Inside IMG’s Huge Sports Production Weekend: From English, U.S., Saudi Soccer to Basketball and F1

While Cannes is prepping for a big film festival closing weekend, including the Palme d’Or awards ceremony, global sports marketing agency IMG, owned by TKO Group, is powering through a massive weekend of sports production for various leagues on multiple continents for various networks, streamers, and audio platforms.

The big sports moments happening around the globe that IMG has already or will be getting from the pitch, field or track to fans’ screens, big or small, include the final day of the English Premier League soccer season, which will see the firm producing 10 concurrent games for 180-plus territories, the final day of Saudi Pro League (SPL) soccer action, meaning nine games for 130-plus territories, the latest round of Major League Soccer (MLS), including 15 matches and studio shows over two days for Apple TV globally, handled from IMG’s new WWE headquarters facilities in Stamford, Connecticut, the EuroLeague Basketball Final Four from Abu Dhabi for global coverage, and the Formula 1 Monaco Grand Prix audio coverage and podcasts for the BBC.

And that’s not all. There is also the English Football League EFL Championship, the league just below the Premier League, for which IMG produces highlights for Sky Sports, DP World Tour golf from Soudal, Belgium, for global coverage, and PGA Tour live coverage and presenter links for Warner Bros. Discovery’s Eurosport.

All that means a busy weekend for IMG’s team at its Stockley Park, London facilities as well as stadiums and other locations.

“It’s not an unusual weekend in terms of the volume. What is unusual and what is actually the biggest issue is the concurrency,” IMG’s executive vp of studios Barney Francis, a former Sky Sports managing director, tells THR via Zoom from Abu Dhabi where he arrived Thursday for the EuroLeague Basketball semifinals on Friday before flying on to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia for the final round of Saudi Pro League soccer. “For example, for the Premier League, the games kick off at four o’clock, all at the same time, on Sunday, because it’s the last day of the season, and the same goes for the SPL on Monday, which is the last day of our first season and nine games all kick off at the same time. Normally, games for television purposes are spread over the course of the weekend. So that adds a level of complexity.”

Francis seems calm despite the task at hand because he trusts his skilled team. “We will have over 1,300 people this weekend working on different live broadcasts, because there’s an unusual level of concurrency, whereas quite often a director, producer or assistant who works on a Premier League game on a Monday night might have also done the game on Saturday at lunchtime,” he explains. “So it’s everything happening at the same time. From the perspective of serving viewers, there’s a lot more for us to make sure we get absolutely right, and the jeopardy is much higher.”

Depending on the sports event, IMG is hired by a league or network or streamer. But whoever the client, the focus during a pressure-cooker weekend like this for everyone at IMG is keeping the eye on the prize of high-quality production. “There’s that extra level of tension because of the importance of it and the extra level of excitement,” shares Francis. “You’ve just got to make sure your heartbeat stays the same. Don’t get too excited! Even though we’re all sports fans, we’re delivering for millions of people around the world who are watching. We’ve got to create the excitement for them. So we have to stay very calm.”

The executive is full of confidence and trust in his production crews around the world. “We couldn’t do this volume of however many hours we’re producing this weekend, if it wasn’t well-oiled with brilliant people in situ who will stand up and take responsibility,” he emphasizes.

And he adds: “We have also increased the volume of pre- and post-game programming for broadcast partners and digital channels, including the Adidas Next Generation EuroLeague junior tournament, YouTube studio shows, the 25^th anniversary opening press conference, analysis, interviews, highlights, and even mic-ing up two players during the match for exclusive features.” 

The digital age, of course, also means all sorts of technological change and new requests that Francis and his IMG are ready to address. “What you’re now seeing as the world changes and the streamers are increasingly getting into sport is that they don’t want to bring in an in-house production capability,” notes Francis. “If you’re a streamer, do you want to bring in that capability and then have that cost of bringing in a whole load of production people annualized over the year? Of course not. They just want to make sure the sporting event goes from the actual incident happening on the pitch to their viewers in the best and cheapest way possible.”

So, what is IMG’s approach as a production company? “We have a magic box of tricks, and we can really flex, because we’ve got access to great people and great facilities around the world,” the executive explains. “So we dial up and we dial down as needed. What we are constantly trying to do is evolve the production model, what I call the tech stack, to make sure that the links in the chain between the event on the pitch and the viewers’ eyeballs are constantly reduced to evolve that make it cheaper, make it better.”

AI is also coming into focus as a technology that could help in this regard. “AI is going to be a brilliant tool in the sports production space,” predicts Francis. “I think it’s really going to be at the back end of our side of the business where AI is going to automate and simplify so much of that production chain. How’s AI going to improve and automate a lot of that workflow?”